Finnish recruiters spot AI deepfakes in remote job interviews

Finnish recruiters are encountering job applicants who use artificial intelligence to alter their faces and voices during remote interviews, Yle reports. The deception can include deepfakes, AI assistants and people posing as someone else.

Susanna Aho, a recruiter at cloud services company UpCloud, told Yle she realised during an interview in October that the candidate had altered both their face and voice. The image looked unnatural and the audio and video quality were poor. The person also appeared to be using voice alteration to imitate a British accent.

Yle tested face and voice alteration in a video call with Aho. She said the manipulated image was not among the worst she had seen, adding that experience can make fakes easier to spot. Aho said that when hundreds of applications arrive for an open technical role, more than half may be fake. She first encountered a suspected deepfake applicant about a year and a half ago and said she could face such candidates almost daily if she did not screen them out beforehand.

Applicants use AI and false identities

Recruiters told Yle that some applicants use real-time AI assistants to help answer interview questions. Liena Silen, a senior headhunter at Eezy, described a case in which an employer’s computer system warned that a candidate was using an AI assistant.

Other applicants may send someone else to the interview. Arja Martikainen, a technology recruiter at Barona, recalled interviewing a candidate who said they were Swedish-speaking Finnish. When she spoke to the person in Swedish, the candidate fell silent. The candidate also gave an address in Helsinki’s Herttoniemi district that Martikainen could not find. She said the person had built a profile using another person’s background details, and the recruitment process ended.

Mira Rantatuva, business director at Talented, said the line is crossed when technology is used to invent experience or skills that the applicant does not have.

Recruiters verify suspicious candidates

Unusual interaction or image distortion, such as glitches when a hand moves in front of a face, can raise suspicion. These signs are a reason to investigate, but do not by themselves establish who the applicant is. Recruiters may ask follow-up questions, request documents or arrange an in-person meeting.

Yle cited a survey of 3,000 jobseekers conducted last year by research and consulting company Gartner. Six per cent said they had either impersonated someone in a job interview or let someone else impersonate them. Gartner forecast that one in four applicant profiles worldwide would be fake by 2028.

Recruiters told Yle that signs of AI-assisted deception can often be spotted in an application.